News & Events

In Senegal, graffiti artists engage actively in the fight against the coronavirus, by creating murals relating to Covid-19 on city walls, to spread information and warn the population and also to support healthcare personnel confronting the disease. Realised in a very short time by the ‘Fondation Dapper’, the free online book Le Graffiti pour sauver des vies: l’art s’engage contre le coronavirus au Sénégal preserves some of this street art. It is the subject of our latest Library Highlight!

'For gathering information about Africa there is no better place in the Netherlands than the library of the African Studies Centre in Leiden'. Marijke Boter wrote an article about the wealth of the ASCL Library on Voertaal.

On the occasion of the Africa 2020 year, the ASCL has created Infosheets about the countries that became independent in 1960. Of the seventeen colonies gaining independence in that year, Congo (earlier known as Zaire, nowadays called the Democratic Republic of the Congo) was the fifth one: on 30 June. Congo had been a Belgian colony from 1908 until 1960, after having been a ‘Free State’ under a company owned by the Belgian King Leopold II from 1884.

Rahmane Idrissa published a new article in the London Review of Books Diary, travelling to Djenné to discover more about the history of the Songhay Empire. Songhay was one of the largest states ever established in Sub-Saharan Africa; for much of the 15th and most of the 16th century, it ruled over what is now Mali, as well as parts of Senegal, Mauritania and Niger, northern Benin and north-western Nigeria.